Quotes About Suffering

Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own, said Mary. I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it.

Those who have deeply suffered in some particular way are welded together in an understanding incomprehensible to those who have not so suffered.

There always comes, I think, a sort of peak in suffering at which either you win over your pain or your pain wins over you, according as to whether you can, or cannot, call up that extra ounce of endurance that helps you to break through the circle of yourself and do the hitherto impossible. That extra ounce carries you through 'le dernier quart d' heure.' Psychologist have a name for it, I believe. Christians call it the Grace of God.

Each time it was like a stray bit of glass pressed into the softness of her heart, grinding, grinding, oh so silently until she no longer noticed when she bled.

Why me? Because you draw me. Because you are kind but not soft. Because when you touch me, the pain is bittersweet. Because you cradle a desperate secret to your bosom, like a viper in your arms, and don't let go of it even as it gnaws upon your very flesh. I want to pry that viper from your arms. To suckle upon your torn and bloody flesh. To take your pain within myself and make it mine.

He lowered his head and beat, fists balled, teeth clenched, the roaring in his ears loud and total. He saw only Thomas's bloody face, his brother's mouth moving, saying something, perhaps pleading, and Griffin's heart swelled with gleeful rage. He'd touched her. He'd hurt her. And for that he deserved to walk upon crippled legs.

You've used me to punish yourself, haven't you? He watched dawning realization spread over her face, a confirmation more positive than anything she could ever say, and that arrow twisted deep in his chest. Yet still he had to ask the last question. Am I anything to you but a punishment?

Why? she asked urgently. Why me? Because, he murmured, you draw me. Because you are kind but not soft. Because you cradle a desperate secret to your bosom, like a viper in your arms, and don't let go of it even as it gnaws on your very flesh. I want to pry that viper from your arms. To take that pain within myself and make it mine.

She watched his chest rise and fall and remembered and reflected. All her life things had been taken from her: Apollo, Thomas's affection, Mama and Papa, her home, her future. No one had ever asked her opinion, garnered her thoughts on what she wanted or needed. Things had been done to her, but she'd never had the chance to do things. Like a doll on a shelf, she'd been moved about, manipulated, flung aside.

I need you. He licked her bruised lip to soothe it. I can't think straight without you. My world is all turned around, and I go through it in pain, wanting to hurt someone.

What started out as wishful thinking, angel given signs from above, was now just an imprisoned lot of dirty, broken pieces that used to belong to beautifully glistening wholes.

All I can say is, it's a sort of kinship, as though there is a family tree of grief. On this branch, the lost children, on this the suicided parents, here the beloved mentally ill siblings. When something terrible happens, you discover all of the sudden that you have a new set of relatives, people with whom you can speak in the shorthand of cousins.

The things that were so bad, that hurt so. If I forget them, if I forget such things still happen, how can I help others? My scars prove that I know myself what others suffer.

The quietness spread, from gray eyes that held no hatred for those who spat at her face or tasted her blood, from a voice that could scream in pain yet mouth no curses after, that spoke, between screams, in a steady confirmation of all good. Those

I sorrow for your suffering, and I am sorry for my early arrogance, that assumed no one else had also suffered

unnecessary discomfort is a form of martyrdom with which I have no sympathy.

Mary wasn't the only one who'd gone around the bend in the last few weeks. Or had Larry always been this way, determinedly unconscious of the deadly results of his "harmless" schemes? Maybe they were all like that, the presidents and chairmen and commanding generals who sat in their fancy offices and gave orders to "engage targets" or "cut the work force." They never saw the suffering, bleeding bodies those orders affected.

You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.

My plans for today are to hang about hoping for a glimpse of her, to have my heart eaten away by the thought of her; to feel my blood bounding maddeningly, ridiculously, like a young boy's; to despair; to realise the weight of my misery and hunger with each step I take.

I'm sure it's wrong to go on being good for too long, till one gets miserable. And I can see you've been good for years and years, because you look so unhappy

You cannot spend your way out of pain. But you can make every pain worse by trying to treat it with money.

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

Depression is all about if you loved me you would. As in, if you loved me you would stop doing your schoolwork, stop going out drinking with your friends on a Saturday night, stop accepting starring roles in theater productions, and stop doing everything besides sitting here by my side and passing me Kleenex and aspirin while I lie and creak and cry and drown myself and you in my misery.

They have no idea what a bottomless pit of misery I am.